The Castaways

ANDREA

T wice she had the same dream. Then three times. It was such a stupid way to manifest her grief. So cliched and predictable that Andrea was too embarrassed to tell anyone about it. There was no one to tell anyway, since Tess was dead.

The dream was real, though. This was to say, she was really having it. Once. Then again. Then a third time, with a variation.

It went as follows: Andrea was her normal self, sitting in her chair on the beach, reading her book. There was shouting from offshore. Someone was drowning. Andrea ran to the shoreline. It was a man caught in the riptide. Andrea motioned with her arms; she shouted: Swim with it—it will carry you down the beach, but you’ll be okay. She was a lifeguard, with a lifeguard’s instincts and knowledge. She did not want to go in to save this man; he was too big. In a rip like this, he would take her down. She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. She had faith that the man would get it; he would save himself! But he was going under. She lost sight of his face. She started swimming. She reached him, got him under the chin. She could do this. In lifesaving class, Andrea had practiced on dummies that weighed twice as much as she did.

It was when they were almost to the shore, when Andrea knew they were both going to be safe, that she allowed herself to look at the man’s face. He had blue eyes, the most piercing eyes she had ever seen. He was, this man, disturbingly handsome. When they reached shore, Andrea waited for him to thank her, but instead the man turned and walked down the beach, away from her. Andrea watched his buttocks in a black Speedo and the triangle of his upper body. His hair was salt-and-pepper curls; he wore a silver hoop earring. He walked toward a woman lying on a towel, a woman who most definitely had not been present when he was shouting for help in the water. The woman raised her head at his approach. It was Phoebe. Andrea thought, Of course, Phoebe. She was heartbroken.

Then, seconds later, Andrea and the man—Pyotr, his name was, he spoke only Russian, though she had no idea how she knew this—were making love against the side of her Jeep. They were, put more accurately, fucking . Because it was wild, tear-at-your-clothes, breathless, stranger sex, sex such as Andrea had never experienced in her life. Pyotr opened the passenger side of Andrea’s Jeep. Andrea sat in the seat while he tasted her.

The Jeep was the same Jeep she had owned during her first summer on Nantucket. She was confused. She asked Pyotr where it had come from. In Russian, which she somehow understood, he said, It’s okay, it’s your Jeep, you can do what you want in it.

Andrea woke up in a panic, her heart shrieking, her hormones raging. She looked at Ed, asleep like a grizzly bear next to her. She filled with guilt. She was riled up, as sexually aroused as she had ever been in her life. Should she wake Ed? And do what? Tell him that she’d had an erotic dream about a man that she’d saved from drowning? A Russian man named Pyotr who was having a relationship with Phoebe? She thought, He was drowning. Of course he was drowning. But that wasn’t what made her sad. What made her sad was that Jeep, the black Jeep she’d bought off the lot at Don Allen Ford in the middle of her first summer, when she was so flush with cash she didn’t know what to do with it. She had driven the Jeep from the dealership straight to the ferry dock, where she picked up Tess, who was fifteen years old, leaving home alone for the first time.

Tess had been wowed by the island, the gray-shingled, cobblestoned quaintness of it, and she had screamed for joy about the black Jeep with the top down. A beach buggy that they could ride in with their dark DiRosa hair flying out behind them.

The dream came again four nights later, at the end of a particularly brutal day, and Andrea recognized it. She knew what was going to happen. She knew the man would shout for help, she knew she would save him, she knew he would leave her for Phoebe, she knew he would come back to her and they would mate like wild animals. In the Jeep, with Andrea’s legs hooked up over the roll bar. This time there was more shame, more worry. She was worried about indecent exposure; she was worried about the police showing up! The police .

Pyotr said, “It’s your car. You can do what you want in it.”

Once she’d had the dream a second time, it was like a TV show she’d become addicted to, or a novel she was reading. The details plagued and baffled her. She thought about the dream for four or five minutes of every hour. Pyotr—who was he? Andrea had never known anyone like him. But that wasn’t possible, was it? Her mind’s eye couldn’t just create a person out of thin air. Pyotr must have been a person she’d seen somewhere, at some point during her life. He was sitting at a cafe during her semester in Florence; he was in her subway car one of the thousands of times she’d ridden the T; she had seen him with his wife at a restaurant. At Straight Wharf, perhaps, where she and Ed went every year on her birthday. The identity of Pyotr nagged at her, as did her mounting sexual energy. She and Ed made love when the spirit moved them—once every two weeks, say, normally in the morning when they woke up together and sunlight was pouring through their bedroom windows, or rain was tapping, and Ed found himself with an erection and, being the practical man that he was, decided it shouldn’t go to waste. The sex was nice. It was familiar and pleasant. Ed knew what Andrea liked; he got the job done.

They had not had sex since Tess died. Ed had assumed sex was the furthest thing from Andrea’s mind. (She would have thought this way, too, if she were Ed.) Plus they now had two little kids in the house, and whereas Finn slept soundly, Chloe was sometimes up three and four times in the night, searching the house for her parents.

Maybe the lack of sex was to blame for these dreams, then? Maybe Andrea was, at the age of forty-four, about to hit menopause, and so her body was throwing itself a surprise party?

Or it was grief. Which, like every other human emotion, revealed itself in ways that made sense and ways that didn’t.

They were, all of them, drowning. Ed was drowning in work. Andrea was drowning in meanness.

Delilah had asked for Greg’s guitar. Barney wanted to learn to play it, she said.

Although Addison was the executor (a fact that made Andrea feel like she was choking on her son’s gym sock), the bag of personal effects from the Coast Guard was at the Chief and Andrea’s house. What remained were the leather overnight bag and the guitar. The guitar was something of a golden egg.

“Barney really wants it,” Delilah said. “He’s dying to learn.”

Andrea had seen Barney, Delilah’s younger son, sit at Greg’s feet every single time Greg played. He was the most devoted worshipper at Greg’s temple. He was probably the only six-year-old who knew all the lyrics to “Bell Bottom Blues.” Andrea was not surprised that Barney wanted the guitar. They had all joked about how Barney would be the next Greg. Greg, but famous. Ha!

“Eric has asked for the guitar,” Andrea said. “We gave it to Eric.”

This was not true. Andrea had asked Eric if he wanted the guitar, and Eric said he’d have to think about it. When Andrea asked him again, Eric said he didn’t want the guitar. He wasn’t musical, could not carry a tune, would be mortified to play in front of anyone. He didn’t want it. Give it to someone else, he said.

Andrea, frankly, had been glad. She thought Greg’s temple was a cult. It sucked you in, but it wasn’t real.

So here was Andrea drowning in meanness: Barney wanted the guitar, he was the correct spiritual heir, Eric did not want the guitar, Andrea was glad Eric did not want the guitar. And still she would not give the guitar to Delilah.

Despicable! Andrea kept a firm line over the phone, but inside she was cringing at her behavior. Tess had died and Andrea was turning into a witch.

Delilah was upset. She pleaded again on Barney’s behalf, but halfheartedly. She hung up without saying goodbye. Andrea supposed she would go to Addison. Get a court order, maybe, for the guitar. Fine! Let her!

Andrea had a moment of weakness. Or was it strength? (Everything was so inside out, she could not tell the difference.) She would call Delilah back and offer Barney the guitar.

But no, she wouldn’t.

Andrea’s copy of The English Patient with its cover and the first eighteen pages ripped out lay on the counter. She could still finish it, Ed pointed out, since the part she had yet to read was unharmed.

She threw the book in the trash, then started wailing. Didn’t he see? Didn’t he see the way everything was ruined?

Andrea tried to put her energies elsewhere. She tried to focus on the twins. But the twins were like little goblins; they both looked so much like Tess that they scared Andrea. Andrea was losing hold of her sanity; she was frightened by two seven-year-olds. Looking at them was like looking at Tess, and Tess was dead. She was never coming back. Andrea would never see her again. She was dead . The reality gripped Andrea around the neck like two bony hands. She avoided looking at the twins. She was barely able to pour their Cheerios, pack their lunch boxes, and get them to camp. Once they were gone (running from the car, exhilarated by their freedom), Andrea drove aimlessly around the island. She was searching for something. What would help? She pulled into an unfamiliar driveway and burst into tears. She screamed with her fist jammed in her mouth.

She went to the grocery store to buy steaks. This was a normal, everyday act. This was what people did when they were alive: they went to the market to shop for food, which they turned into meals. The grocery store was chilly and indifferent. The produce section featured neat pyramids of plums, peaches, nectarines, grapes, wedges of watermelon. Knobs of gingerroot, bags of coleslaw mix. How could any of this matter? Tess was dead, she was in a coffin, in the ground not a half-mile away. But she was gone. That smiling face, that perky voice. Dead. Andrea hurried through the store to the butcher shop. If Andrea had died and Tess was alive, would Tess be able to make a trip to the store? Yes, of course. But Andrea was not Tess. She felt like she was going to asphyxiate. Air, she needed air; she needed to be outside. But being outside felt wrong, too. How could Andrea enjoy sunshine and the breeze when Tess was in the ground? She couldn’t be inside and she couldn’t be outside. She was a mess.

She grabbed six rib-eye steaks. They were far more expensive than the steaks she usually bought, but who cared anymore about money? Andrea cut down the cereal aisle to the cashier—and bad luck. In front of her in line was Heather Dickson, wife of one of Ed’s sergeants, whom Andrea had not seen since this happened. When Heather saw Andrea, her face instantly registered that cross between sympathy and pity that Andrea so detested.

Andrea held up a hand, not in greeting but in traffic-cop sign language. STOP . Please don’t speak. I cannot handle the kindest words.

Although Heather’s husband was a policeman who did occasionally direct traffic outside the Boys she had not realized that both Eric and Kacy would miss dinner. Although, really, she thought, when was the last time either of them had been home for dinner? They were putting themselves outside the house on purpose. They didn’t want to be at home with their deranged mother.

The flames jumped as Andrea laid the steaks down.

Was there a hell? She wondered. Really, was there? She had been a Catholic for forty-four years, educated by the nuns and the Jesuits, and this was the first time she’d thought to ask.

Chloe came out on the deck, holding a piece of robin’s-egg-blue construction paper folded in half. Andrea took the paper but did not look at Chloe.

“What have we here?” Andrea asked.

“A formal request,” Chloe said.

This should have been enough to make Andrea smile, but it was beyond her. She opened the paper. It had been decorated around the edges with curlicues, flowers, and birds. At the top, Chloe had written: A Formal Request.

[_Can we please go to Auntie Dee’s house tomorrow after camp _ and perhaps spend the night?

Andrea was speechless. She resisted the urge to throw the formal request onto the grill flames. It was innocent, she reminded herself. Chloe and Finn wanted to see their friends. But still, the “formal request” was for “Auntie Dee’s house.” Auntie Dee would cut their grilled cheese into fun shapes; she would permit them to run through the sprinkler until the fireflies came out. The twins did not want Andrea. They wanted Delilah. She couldn’t blame them, but it infuriated her.

She handed the formal request back to Chloe, not able to look her in the eye. “We’ll see,” she said.

Chloe stood before her for one resigned moment. “That means no.”

“That means we’ll see.”

Chloe fled.

Andrea collapsed onto a deck chair and sank her face in her hands. Need anything?

“I need Tess back,” she whispered. Denial was such a stupid phase of grief, especially for a forty-four-year-old woman who had lost both her parents and well knew that death happened to each and every one of us. And yet at any second the finality of Tess’s death could level Andrea. She wanted to rip her hair out, tear her clothes, get on her knees and beg the sky, Bring her back!

The grill was smoking. Andrea pulled the steaks off just as the Chief walked onto the deck.

“Hey,” he said. “Those smell good.” His voice was light and chipper. How could he be chipper? It was twenty minutes to eight. He had stayed at work for twelve hours. He didn’t want to be at home with her either.

Andrea stared at the platter of steaks. They did smell good, and they had cost her seventy dollars. The grocery store was booby-trapped with land mines. She couldn’t stand to see anybody she knew. She didn’t want pity or sympathy or understanding. But neither could she tolerate cheerful, normal life moving on. She was falling apart. Couldn’t anyone see that she was falling apart?

She flipped the steaks off the deck, and they landed in her unwatered perennial bed.

“Jesus!” the Chief said. He grabbed her arm. “Andrea! What the hell? ”

Need anything? She crumpled.

That night, after the Chief had pulled the steaks out of the garden dirt and washed them off, sliced them thinly, and cajoled both the twins and Andrea to eat, Andrea wandered into her bedroom, lay down on her bed fully clothed, and fell immediately to sleep.

She had the dream a third time. The man shouting for help, shouting in a language she didn’t understand, but no matter, she understood the urgency. She swam out, she grabbed hold of him, she said, Just float. I’ll get us in. I’m a lifeguard! She noticed his deep blue eyes. And then later, when he was walking away, she noticed his salt-and-pepper curls, his earring. When Phoebe lifted her face from the towel, Andrea felt her heart break. Of course he belonged to someone else. He belonged to Phoebe. But she felt something else, too: hope, anticipation.

And there they were, in the Jeep, clawing at one another, sucking, biting. He was behind her, but she didn’t like it. I want to see you! she said. I want to see your face! She could feel his fingers on her nipples, his mouth on her neck. But she wanted to see his face! She turned.

It was Jeffrey.